The First of July (18 page)

Frank, France, June 1916

A
ROTTEN DAY.

Some Frenchmen were billeted with us on their way to join their section. I spent the evening talking bicycles with them. When I say talking, we weren’t so much talking as gesturing. Isaac tried Esperanto, but it’s not as good for communicating as it was as an idea back in London. Isaac insisted he’d been able to speak to all sorts using it—French, Belgians, Bulgarians, even a German prisoner, though the sergeant said he was shouting at the German in some lingo Jewish people know, not Esperanto at all. But it was obvious that what Isaac was really good at was gestures. He didn’t even realize how naturally these came to him, so much so that he’d started to use them when speaking English to his chums.

I said to the Frenchies, slowly, that they had some good cyclists.

“Tour de France,” I said very clearly. “
tour de france.
” I sensed Isaac pedaling an imaginary bicycle beside me.

One of the Frenchmen was nodding his head. “Tour de France,” he answered back.

His friend was giving Isaac some clear liquid from a small bottle, patting his chest to make it clear that it was French medicine for coughs. Isaac knocked it back and his eyes watered and he breathed out hard,but in a while he stopped coughing and looked a lot happier.

So I said to the other man, “François Faber
mort
.” Because I knew
mort
. You soon learned the word for dead when you were a soldier.
Tot
it was in German.

The Frenchman nodded. And mimed a machine gun.

I nodded.

His friend nodded too, and then he said something very quickly and I thought I heard the name Lapize.

“Lapize? Octave Lapize?” I said.

They both nodded.

“Mort,”
said one.

“Terrible,” said the other, almost in English.

Not Lapize, I thought. Not after poor Faber getting it. Not the proud Lapize. I could have wept.

Once war came, that had put an end to the Tour de France. France was not the greatest of racetracks now but the worst of battlefields, and a bog to boot. The race was finished and the champions had become soldiers. Now it seemed like it was the end of those cycling men too.

“Lapize
mort
?” I said and, half-heartedly, made a movement like a firing gun.

He shook his head. Put his thumbs together and turned his hands into a bird, flapping them down across his body and making, although quietly, the noise of a screaming aeroplane.

“Pilote,”
says his chum. Which meaning I grasped. And it is obvious what happened to Lapize. Tried to master the air as well as he had the mountains, it seems. For a while, anyway.

It sickened me.

I’d been that glad to see Isaac again. Went back to billets one spring day and there he was. We’d been split up on arriving in France in late ’15. He’d been kept at base in Étaples, I’d gone on attachment to the 30th. He sent a battalion Christmas card with Father Christmas riding on a gun carriage to say he was well and had done no fighting. He put in a cutting about striking factory workers back home. Connie had been arrested for “agitating workers.” He’d written “Nothing new then!” on the top. So when I walked in, saw him and his pack sitting on a bunk like two orphans, I could have thrown my arms around him.

“Where’s your hat?” I asked straight off.

“It’s a
ushanka
,” said he. “That’s its Russian name. I could have sold it ten times over last winter. Including officers. But I didn’t. If anything happens to me, it’s yours.”

He looked more sickly than ever. He’d been in the hospital for a while with a bronchial infection. Even the doctor had tried to buy the
ushanka
, he said.

For all that we were both glad being together, we found ourselves squabbling much of the time. He’d liked the training all right, and was good at it, but the active service didn’t seem to suit him. The area was all countryside for a start, and what villages there were were half deserted or being turned into rubble, and Isaac had never been happy outside a town. But I couldn’t cope with all the dramatics. When I called him on it, he’d give me this doleful look as if it wasn’t even odds whether either of us could come to grief. But I’d soon had it with him carrying on like he was already done for every time he went out. It was bad luck.

For example, one evening, when things were starting to heat up, Mr. Pierce came along and took two cyclists to go forward to run messages for the Lancashires. One was Isaac. He put his stuff together on his bed, coughing a bit as he did. The tracts, his Book of Thoughts, his Esperanto dictionary, his clippings and pamphlets, and his creased photograph of his father and mother, taken in the last century by the look of it. He suddenly got very formal and insisted on shaking my hand.

“Please write to my brother if I don’t come back,” he said.

“Don’t be an ass,” said I. “You’ll get a grandstand view, see a bit of proper action but not be part of it, and you’ll be back swanking and able to live off it for days.” He would, too, in his pessimistic way. That was Isaac all over.

“His address is in my tin,” he said. “But it’s easy. It’s the same as my name. Meyer Street. Number 14, Meyer Street. Stepney. If you remember fourteen, that’s all you need. Samuel will get it. When he gets out of prison.”

But I wasn’t listening, because to hear would be bad luck.

Five hours later, Isaac came back in, pushing his machine. He nodded, in a sort of exhausted, sort of relieved, sort of proud way.

“All right?” I said.

He nodded again, breathless. “Sticky,” he said. “It was, I mean. Out there. Very bad.”

But as he put his photograph and his book and his dictionary away, something about him said Now I’ve seen it all and I didn’t shirk it. That night he didn’t cough at all. Very quiet, he was.

So, his luck held and my luck held for ten months or so from when we’d signed our papers right through to the next summer. But then as June unfolded, stuff started to go wrong. One of our best officers caught it just standing there lighting his pipe, one patrol went out and didn’t return, and our colonel collapsed with a burst ulcer. Sent back to Blighty.

I went out with a message one foul night, thinking that if Nora and I fell in a shell hole, she’d drown us both, and when I got there—a trench overlooking Mametz—there was nobody wanting my message, just three dead men, sitting tidy, all with their throats cut. Even after everything I’d seen, it gave me the heebie-jeebies. I was looking behind me; someone had crept up on these three, unexpected; two hadn’t even lifted their rifles. On the way back, I heard shouting and passed a wagon train with two soldiers, and they had slipped half into a crater of mud and they’d shot one of their mules, as it had broken its leg. They’d cut the remaining mule free, and it had pulled away and charged off to fall in the next foxhole. As I came past, one of the soldiers jumped on the other lad, knocked him backward, and looked fit to drown him too.

I was a bit iffy with Isaac when I got back. I shouldn’t have been—he’d been a good friend to me, but he thought backward too much.

“Did you ever see men dead before?” he said. “I saw my mother and father, but they were neat in their clothes. I never thought to see bits of people. But yesterday—”

“I’ve seen thousands of the deceased,” I said. “Timely and untimely. In all conditions of death.” It was probably an exaggeration and less than a hundred was more like it and the worst I’d seen before France was an old farmer hanged himself. Isaac looked at me as if I was Jack the Ripper, so I had to tell him my father was a coffin-maker and I’d gone with him for the measuring since I was a young ’un.

“You never said,” he said, as if we were an old married couple keeping secrets from each other. “Though I always thought your voice was a bit funny.”

Two days it rained: bad news for battles and cycles alike. We all thought the big show was in days: June 25, some swore, definitely the twenty-eighth others said, but, like a creeping barrage, the day of reckoning (what the new colonel called “giving Jerry a good kick up the backside”) seemed to march on ahead of us.

They’d been moving up men and stores for weeks: rolling stock, horses, and mule trains bringing it in, and there were more gunners and guns than I’d ever seen in one place. Put your hand out and you’d touch a gunner. Not that you’d want to, they were a cocky lot and thought it was all about them. So did the sappers. We cyclists didn’t. We
followed
war, we didn’t make it. With no war, they’d be out of a job and we’d just be on a pleasant tour of the Continent.

There were exercises and patrols like there was no tomorrow, but unfortunately tomorrow was always what we were leading up to and—when we got there—was what some of us would have no more of. Everybody was exhausted and tense all at the same time. A random shell hit one of the latrines, blew it and its contents sky-high. The men in it knew nothing, I expect, dying with their breeches down. You’d feel safe like that, I thought, as if you’d stepped out of the war, but you weren’t safe anywhere with guns that could fire from miles away.

What a stinking mess.

That waiting made some mute, made some peevish, excited some madmen, and made most of us damned fed up. I saw a man fly into a rage because he was doing a jigsaw and the last two pieces were missing. Sky was all they were, you could see it was a picture of Windsor Castle, but he was accusing this man and that in a fury. Another West Country lad was full of how his brother had helped a wounded French soldier; but when he’d unbuttoned the blue tunic, underneath it was a girl. “Short hair but two little titties,” he said. “What do you think about that?” He told us the story three, four, five times over, holding his hands up in a double squeezing action on each telling.

But it wasn’t likely anything special would happen while the rain kept coming down. At night the noise of it, on the sheets of corrugated iron that were called a roof, was almost louder than the exchanges of fire from the forward trenches and the thump-bloody-thump of our guns. The water trickled through, and no sooner had you moved clear of one drip than the rain found a new way in. The M.O. had given Isaac syrup for his cough a while back, but he’d still wake us up, hacking away, then keep us awake finding a spoon he’d lifted from a canteen and carefully measuring out the dose by the light of a torch, all the while, in case any of us, by some miracle, was still asleep, hissing, “Sorry. Sorry, boys.”

“Just take a swig,” I said one night. “It’s not opium, it’s sugar water. You don’t need to measure it. Take too much, you’re not going to die of it; more likely it’ll fatten you up, which you need.”

“It’s got squills in it. It says syrup of squills,” he said.

“What the hell are squills?”

“I don’t know,” he said miserably. “They don’t seem to help.”

One of the other lads had said they’d be better off ditching the medicine and giving everyone who had to be in billets with Isaac a double dose of rum.

“You’re all bones, Meyer,” he said. “Just go forward sideways and no Jerry’ll ever hit you: all they’ll see is a helmet and a kitbag and they’ll think you’re a spook.”

“He’s bonier than his cycle, en’t he, Hermann?” one spotty boy said to me, hardly able to speak for laughing. “Your machine gets in the mud again, you can ride on Spook here.”

After that, the names stuck, though for me he was always Isaac and I Frank to him. The next evening, we were polishing our equipment when he started coughing. Then, as he reached for it, he saw that someone had emptied his bottle. It lay on its side in a small sticky puddle beside his pack. The cork was nowhere to be seen. Isaac looked as if he was going to cry. His stifled coughs went on all night.

At one point, a voice from the darkness said “If you don’t stop coughing, I swear I’ll spike you on my bayonet.”

And then another merry lad said “We could let Spook get captured by Jerry, and then he could drive
them
all mad with his cough. He’d be a secret weapon. Tire them to death.”

I spent that night feeling low. It seemed to get light only an hour or two after darkness fell, and I got up and went out for a ciggie, though it was a habit I was finding hard to acquire. It was warm, but a fine drizzle was falling. All the time the guns. What hell they were laying down over there in Fritz’s luxury trenches, with their electricity and cuckoo clocks, I thought. At least I hoped they were. Or mostly I hoped so, but sometimes I thought there might be some Manfred or Wolfgang over there as had worked his way up to the counter of a great shop in Berlin and thought he’d got it made and now, well, now was all he’d got.

It was edgy waiting, like it always was, even when it wasn’t you going out. I wondered if the boys were in position ready to go all this time.

I went over and unfolded Nora, glad the ground was drier and I had a chance of getting messages through. Nora felt warm. I checked her tires, though I’d done it the evening before. Checked the chain, which was clean and oiled. Spun the pedals. Looked in my tool kit. As I was standing there, Lieutenant Pierce appeared out of the darkness. I held the handlebar with my left hand and saluted with my right arm. Not a wobble; the training sergeant would have been proud of me.

“At ease,” he said.

Here we go, I thought. Let battle begin.

“Don’t worry,” he said, as if I might be feeling left out. “We’ll be needing you a lot in a day or so. They’re trying to run extra trenches across no-man’s land, make it easier for the You Know What. I’m afraid you’ll mostly be bringing shopping lists back; a bit of an errand boy. The wires are a mess there and the signalers have got other priorities.”

We exchanged a look, man to man.

So here I am. Errand Boy of the Western Front. But tomorrow I have to cycle to Amiens, Mr. Pierce says, which will be a matter of real roads, fifteen miles of them.

Mostly I’d be better off being a runner instead of lumbering around with a heap of metal, but mostly in the Army if you’re down as a cyclist you stay a cyclist until the end. Which I sometimes think will be sooner rather than later, slowed down as I am by poor old Nora. Sometimes I think of old Dick Wilson and how I came by Nora and her being at war and what he’d think of Hercules being swapped for Nora and a form with a quartermaster’s moniker on it and a regimental rubber stamp.